Obituary: Arthur Cruickshank 1932 - 2011. A native Gondwanan, who studied the former continent's fossil tetrapods

Dr Arthur Richard Ivor Cruickshank died on 4th December 2011, aged 79, in the Borders General Hospital, Melrose, Scotland. Arthur Cruickshank was part of the post-war generation of palaeontologists who laid the foundations on which today’s researchers build. Appropriately for someone from an expatriate Scots family living in Kenya, much of his work was on the extinct reptiles of the great southern palaeocontinent of Gondwana

Haplotype Affinities Resolve a Major Component of Goat (Capra hircus) MtDNA D-Loop Diversity and Reveal Specific Features of the Sardinian Stock

Goat mtDNA haplogroup A is a poorly resolved lineage absorbing most of the overall diversity and is found in locations as distant as Eastern Asia and Southern Africa. Its phylogenetic dissection would cast light on an important portion of the spread of goat breeding. The aims of this work were 1) to provide an operational definition of meaningful mtDNA units within haplogroup A, 2) to investigate the mechanisms underlying the maintenance of diversity by considering the modes of selection operated by breeders and 3) to identify the peculiarities of Sardinian mtDNA types. We sequenced the mtDNA D-loop in a large sample of animals (1,591) which represents a non-trivial quota of the entire goat population of Sardinia. We found that Sardinia mirrors a large quota of mtDNA diversity of Western Eurasia in the number of variable sites, their mutational pattern and allele frequency. By using Bayesian analysis, a distance-based tree and a network analysis, we recognized demographically coherent groups of sequences identified by particular subsets of the variable positions. The results showed that this assignment system could be reproduced in other studies, capturing the greatest part of haplotype diversity

An exploratory study of the relation between supply chain topological features and supply chain performance

This paper aims at investigating the relations between supply chain design decisions (i.e. number of supply chain levels, number of nodes at each level, number of sources for each node and distance between nodes) and supply chain performance (i.e. stock-outs at the retailer level) in a pull-based supply chain. A framework expressing the hypothesized relations among the above-mentioned variables has been developed and validated by applying simulation techniques and statistical analysis. The number of nodes at each level has been demonstrated to increase stock-outs at the retailer level. On the contrary, performance is not affected by both the number of supply chain levels and the distance between nodes. The number of sources for each node seems to increase stock-outs at the retailer level but no statistical evidence for this has been found. This work can support managers in taking supply chain design decisions and in defining countermeasures to mitigate their effects on supply chain performance

Space station traffic model in support to the European automated transfer vehicle design

200